[plug] firewall computer - was Re: [plug] Has anyone else seen a flurry of Windows probes recently?

[Craig Ringer]

> Beats ours (more minimal than ours); servicing 5 client computers, we 
> have a Cyrix 100MHz 6x86, with 32MB RAM.
> 
> I just wonder whether the speed, etc, of a firewall/gateway computer, 
> restricts the throughput speed of data.

Not noticeably. That said, you may want more RAM (say, 16M) if you'll be 
doing iptables connection tracking (as you should be really), especially 
with lots of UDP traffic eg gaming.

For a while I suspected that the CPU requirements were a bit higher if 
the machine was to handle significant traffic like 512k DSL, but I've 
since confirmed that the problems I was observing were not with the 
firewall box but with the ISP.

-- 
Craig Ringer
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